I'm going to geek out about photography for a moment here:
I got my first roll of slide film back from the lab today (Provia 400) and oh. my. god. I can't believe how good the results turned out. This shot is the first I'm posting from that roll, but it's certainly not the best.
I had read that slide film is very hard to shoot with because it has very little lattitude - ie, it's easy to fuck up your exposure. I was certain that there would be some shots on the roll that were completely screwed up, because a couple of days there I certainly wasn't paying as close attention to the camera meter as I should have been.
But I'm amazed. The dynamic range of this film is insane. I took a bunch of shots at that anti-war protest they had last week? There was extremely bright sun that day, and the shadows were really sharp and dark. Had I been using the digital camera, there would have been shots where the sky was totally blown out, but on this film, it's a deep dark blue. And the people in the shadows are still in perfect detail! There's a small chance I was using the polarizing filter that day, but honestly, I'm pretty sure I wasn't. I'm pretty sure it's the film. Fuck! I'm extremely impressed.
It's like there's some magic chemical on there, called "make picture look good." Even in the shots where I was intending to backlight the subject (like the one linked to above) you can still make out some shadow detail. But more importantly, every picture on the roll turned out exactly as I had hoped. What a feeling!
No wonder the damn film is so bloody expensive. It's insanely, prohibitively expensive, honestly - only really worth it if you're a professional, or to buy for yourself once a year or something.
I'm strongly tempted to buy several rolls to take with me to cuba for the wedding. That'll be another several hundred bucks, but hey...it's the last time I'll be in Cuba for a long while right? |
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